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KU 


KENNEDY,  William  Sloane, 

Clews  to  Emerson's 
mystic  verse. 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
RIVERSIDE 


'A  'N  '•*«»»" 
U3QNI8  131HJWVJ 


Clews  to  Emerson's 
Mystic  Verse 


By 


WILLIAM  SLOANE  KENNEDY 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


JUNE  1903 


Clews  to  Emerson's 
Mystic  Verse 


By 


WILLIAM  SLOANE  KENNEDY 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


JUNE  1903 


K4 


CLEWS  TO  EMERSON'S  MYSTIC  VERSE. 

PREFATORY  NOTE. 

Of  the  following  studies  in  Emerson's  poetry,  as  origi 
nally  printed,*  my  friends  Charles  Eliot  Norton,  William 
Rounseville  Alger,  and  Charles  Molloy,  all  veteran  students 
of  their  revered  friend's  verse,  and  among  the  best  living 
interpreters  of  his  thought,  wrote  me  in  very  flattering  terms 
expressive  of  their  enjoyment  in  reading  them  and  their 
approval  of  the  material  as  accurate  and  of  permanent  value. 
Hence  its  appearance  in  this  pamphlet  form.  I  have  availed 
myself  of  Professor  Norton's  judgment  in  correcting  one  or 
two  points  in  which  I  was  in  error.  The  "  Clews  "  are  not 
intended  to  be  read  independently  of  the  poems,  but  as  gloss 
and  commentary  for  one  who  has  the  poems  in  hand. 

W.  S.  K. 
BELMONT,  MASS.,  May  i,  1903. 

*  In  Poet-lore. 

The.  Society  of  American  Authors  is  indebted  to  Mr.  William  Sloane 
Kennedy  for  the  entire  contents  of  this  number. 


CLEWS  TO  EMERSON'S  MYSTIC  VERSE. 

"  When  a  man's  verses  cannot  be  understood,  nor  a  man  s 
good  wit  seconded  with  the  forward  child  Understanding,  it 
strikes  a  man  more  dead  than  a  great  reckoning  in  a  little 
room" — SHAKESPEARE. 

One  would  have  supposed  that  the  beauty  of  Emerson's 
spheral  songs  would  before  this  have  given  them  wide  vogue 
among  the  circles  that  have  recently  come  into  the  full 
enjoyment  of  his  philosophical  prose  and  adopted  him  into 
their  calendar  of  saints.  Instead  of  the  two  or  three  plain 
and  not  over-attractive  editions  in  which  his  poems  are 
issued  it  would  seem  as  if  before  this  the  demand  for  them 
would  have  been  such  that  they  could  have  been  printed  on 
costly  paper,  filled  with  delicate  engravings,  and  bound  like 
rarest  missals.  One  trouble  seems  to  be  that  the  numerous 
poems  containing  obscure  and  mystical  passages  have  never 
been  annotated.  Probably,  too,  the  omission  hitherto  to 
explain  a  single  one  of  Emerson's  mysterious  titles  has  helped 
to  repel  people  who  hate  opacity  in  a  poet. 

Yet,  after  all,  the  age  has  caught  up  with  Emerson.  The 
old  jests  about  the  unintelligibility  of  Transcendentalism  are 
out  of  date.  The  tradition  that  Emerson  is  always  irritatingly 
obscure  to  the  general  reader  has  drifted  along  unchallenged 
as  one  of  the  cela  va  sans  dire's.  But  the  fact  that  thirty-five 
of  his  poems — one-third  of  all — have  been  issued  by  his  pub 
lishers  in  an  excellent  educational  series  for  schoolboys  and 
schoolgirls,  and  that  the  notes  are  chiefly  illustrative  and  not 
the  explanation  of  difficult  thought,  is  proof  positive  that  he 
is  at  last  one  of  the  popular  poets.  He  is  no  longer  obscure, 
except  in  certain  of  his  higher  mystic  utterances,  of  which  it 
is  the  object  of  these  papers  to  give  interpretations.  I 
expressly  omit  passages  which  have  heretofore  anywhere 
been  cleared  up. 

Fifty  years  ago  Emerson's  poetry  was  a  stumbling-block 
and  offence  to  all  but  a  few.  Professor  Francis  Bowen's 
attempt  to  laugh  Emerson  down  (in  the  North  American 
Review,  April,  1847)  affords  one  of  the  most  delicious  bits  of 


THE,  AM  URIC  AN  AUTHOR 


fun  of  Transcendental  times.  It  is,  of  course,  a  battering- 
ram  of  rubber,  knocking  its  author  down  by  the  recoil.  He 
patronizes  Emerson,  girds  at  him  as  a  freak,  a  kind  of 
prestidigitator  who  was  trying  to  win  notoriety  by  startling 
and  surprising  people.  The  funniest  part  of  it  all  is  his 
solemn  bewilderment  over  the  most  elementary  common 
places  of  the  idealistic  philosophy.  His  avalanche  of  abuse 
and  ridicule  was  evidently  intended  as  a  crusher.  He  was 
the  proprietor  of  the  Review  and  could  beat  the  big  drum  as 
he  pleased  :  he  writes  in  the  catch-grin  style  of  the  anon 
ymous  critic,  and  counts  with  good  reason  on  guffaws  of 
approving  laughter  from  the  fellows  with  glue  in  their  heads 
for  brains.  At  the  very  time  he  was  writing,  Rev.  Cyrus  A. 
Bartol,  Rev.  Orestes  A.  Brownson,  and  Rev.  Dr.  F.  H.  Hedge 
were  printing  warm  eulogies  of  the  new  poetry  as  art,  though 
as  strait-laced  clerics  they  were  scandalized  by  its  heresies  in 
ethics  and  philosophy.  Brownson,  it  is  true,  asserted  that 
Emerson  was  the  hierophant  to  a  set  of  neophytes  made  up 
chiefly  of  "beardless  young  men  and  silly  maidens  with 
pretty  curls,"  and  he  and  Bartol  found  the  "Threnody" 
infinitely  sad,  because  technically  non- Christian  in  tone  ;  but 
Bartol  admitted  that  "  every  touch  of  the  pencil "  in  this 
poem  "draws  a  tear,"  and  that  "as  a  painting  of  grief  it  is 
unrivalled";  while  noble  Dr.  Hedge  (the  first  to  welcome 
Emerson  as  a  poet)  had  printed  in  1845,  two  years  before  his 
verse  had  appeared  in  book  form  at  all,  such  sentences  as 
these  :  "  He  carols  a  lay  that  is  tart  and  wholesome,  and  stirs 
the  blood  with  a  keen  delight,  like  a  draught  of  morning  air." 
"  To  perceive  a  truth  with  him  is  to  be  on  fire  with  it,  is  to 
blaze  with  it ;  it  bursts  from  him  in  flashes  of  intense 
illumination.  Thought  and  word  hang  together  like  the 
lightning  and  the  thunder  in  a  summer  cloud." 

There  is  one  blemish  in  Emerson's  verse  that  unfortunately 
has  a  comic  effect, — his  too  frequent  use  of  rhymes  of  the  eye. 
And  the  worst  of  it  is  that  these  cacophonies  occasionally 
haunt  one's  memory.  But  one  can  soon  acquire  the  habit  of 
reading  him  by  the  eye  and  ignoring  the  false  report  to  the 
ear.  The  elevation  and  extreme  beauty  of  the  thought  make 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


a  sympathetic  reader  forget  the  technique.  Emerson's  later 
lyrics  have  a  marvellous  melody.  Many  of  his  terse  epigrams 
have  long  been  proverbial.  The  diction  is  incompressible. 
The  verses  have  the  symmetry  of  comb-honey,  and  the  serried 
lines  are  cells  burdened  with  the  nectar  of  thought.  A  kind 
of  ad  unguem  finish  in  them,  a  signet  stamp  of  the  predestined, 
as  if  minted  in  the  brain  of  Brahm.  The  sweet  kernel  of  the 
poems  is  a  supreme  ethics.  They  are  clusters  of  edelweiss 
on  Alpine  cliffs  ;  breathe  also  a  fine  sanity  and  pure  patriot 
ism,  and  lie  close  to  the  heart  and  to  the  warm,  familiar 
landscape.  The  man  who  does  not  like  Emerson's  poetry 
has  not  a  shred  of  idealistic  philosophy  in  his  soul. 

Lowell,  in  one  of  his  reviews  of  Emerson,  makes  the  re 
mark  that  his  poems  are  not  lyrical.  He  must  have  used  the 
word  "  lyrical "  in  its  narrowest  etymological  sense.  Emer 
son's  poems  on  love,  as  well  as  his  hymns,  undoubtedly  have 
the  lyrical  quality;  that  is,  they  express  personal  emotion  and 
are  suited  for  song  or  musical  accompaniment.  Then  his 
philosophical  chants  constitute  what  Theodore  Watts,  in  his 
admirable  analytical  study  of  poetry  in  the  Encyclopedia 
Britannica,  calls  "  The  Great  Lyric."  They  are  the  outpour 
ing  of  the  soul  toward  God  by  a  man  so  possessed  with  spirit 
ual  ideas,  his  soul  so  "imbathed  with  the  fragrancy  of 
heaven,"  that  he  sees  and  feels  little  besides. 

Let  me  hold  up  against  the  light  a  few  of  the  occult  pas 
sages  of  Emerson's  lyrical  chants,  to  detect  the  water-line 
pattern  within. 

INITIAL,  DAEMONIC,  AND  CELESTIAL  LOVE. 
Briefly  speaking,  "  Initial,  Daemonic,  and  Celestial  Love," 
in  Emerson's  poem  with  that  title,  mean  respectively  the 
physical  or  Cupid  love,  "whose  roses  bleach  apace";  the 
haughty,  selfish  love  of  mere  beauty  and  intellect;  and  the 
love  of  soul  for  soul,  the  high  spiritual  love,  cool  and  philoso 
phical  and  godlike.  A  passage  in  the  "  Initial  Love,"  on  the 
omens  which  Cupid  consults, — 

"  And  chance-dropped  hints  from  Nature's  sphere 
Deeply  soothe  his  anxious  ear," — 


THH  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


is  illustrated  by  a  remark  in  the  address  on  "  The  Method  of 
Nature"  (1841),  in  which  Love  is  pictured  as  consulting 
"every  omen  in  nature  with  tremulous  interest."*  And  in 
the  following  paragraph  the  "  Daemonic  Love  "  is  in  part  pre 
figured:  "And  what  is  genius  but  finer  love,  a  love  imper 
sonal,  a  love  of  the  flower  and  perfection  of  things,  and  a  de 
sire  to  draw  a  new  picture  or  copy  of  the  same?"  The 
daemonic  love  is  the  fierce  passion  of  an  artist  for  the  beauti 
ful;  the  proud  and  haughty  love  of  the  intellectual  and  the 
beautiful  and  fortunate  ones  of  earth.  Emerson,  taking  up 
the  Platonic  or  Socratic  idea  of  daimons, — i.  e.,  ministering 
spirits  or  guardian  angels,  holding  a  place  intermediate 
between  gods  and  men, — attributes  to  them  the  origin  of  the 
intellectual  love.  In  plain  prose  and  terms  of  psychology,  the 
daimon  realm  means  simply  the  ratiocinative  or  cerebral 
function.  He  gives  us  a  hint  of  this: 

"  Close,  close  to  men, 
Like  undulating  layer  of  air, 
Right  above  their  heads 
The  potent  plain  of  Daemons  spreads." 

"But  God  said,  I  will  have  a  purer  gift,"  a  celestial  love,  based 
on  a  trance-vision  of  the  realm  of  pure  being,  the  realm  of 
Brahm.  Those  possessing  this  illuminating  love  know  each 
other's  thought  without  speech ;  they  live  to  universal  ends, 
and  are  never  daunted  by  the  vicissitudes  of  time. 

PTOLEMAIC  IMAGERY. 
In  this  poem  the  sublime  passage  beginning, 

"  Deep,  deep  are  loving  eyes," 
and  going  on  with 

"  Higher  far  into  the  pure  realm," 

contains  the  whole  Hindoo  and  Ptolemaic  cosmogonies  in  a 
nutshell. 

*  Mr.  Geo.  H.  Browne,  in  his  Emerson  primer,  has  shown  how  many  passages  in  Emerson's 
poetry  can  be  paralleled  by  corresponding  passages  in  the  prose.  Sometimes  the  poet  simply 
ifu  a  line  from  his  prose  into  his  verse.  For  example,  the  closing  words  of  the  address  on, 
"  Man  the  Reformer  are  "to  sow  the  sun  and  moon  for  seeds."  In  "The  Poet"  occurs  the  lint 
"He  sowed  the  sun  and  moon  for  seeds." 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


Speaking  of  the  vision  of  the  spiritual  eyes,  he  says: 

"  Their  reach  shall  yet  be  more  profound, 
And  a  vision  without  bound; 
The  axis  of  those  eyes  sun-clear 
Be  the  axis  of  the  sphere: 
So  shall  the  lights  ye  pour  amain 
Go,  without  check  or  intervals, 
Through  from  the  empyrean  walls 
Unto  the  same  again." 

He  is  speaking  here  in  terms  of  the  Ptolemaic  astronomy;  and 
in  intimating  that  those  who  perceive  the  vast  love  that  hold 
the  universe  together  shall  have  eyes  that  pierce,  light-swift, 
from  one  side  to  the  other  of  the  empyrean,  he  more  directly 
follows  Dante  and  Milton,  who  place  outside  of  and  ensphering 
all  of  the  conglobed  crystalline  shells  of  the  Ptolemaic  astron 
omers  the  empyreal  heaven  of  luminous  flame,  where  the 
invisible  God  dwells.  Emerson,  in  the  lines  above  cited,  calls 
it,  indeed,  "  the  "  sphere,  so  vast  and  all-inclusive  is  it.  Dante 
describes  it  in  the  "  Convito,"  and  in  the  last  cantos  of  the 
"  Paradise,"  which  picture  the  Celestial  Rose  of  the  redeemed 
bathed  in  refulgent  light.  Milton  says  that  under  the  burn 
ing  wheels  of  the  Son  of  God 

"  The  steadfast  Empyrean  shook  throughout." 

Now,  every  sphere  or  globe  is  imagined  to  have  an  "  axis,"  or 
line  running  from  circumference  to  circumference  through 
the  centre,  about  which  it  revolves;  and  Emerson  imagines 
the  vision  as  co-extensive  with  the  empyreal  sphere  and  fill 
ing  it,  so  that  the  axis  of  the  sphere  and  the  axis  of  the  vision 
may  be  considered  as  identical.  The  supplanting  of  the 
Ptolemaic  theory  of  the  universe  by  the  Copernican  and  New 
tonian  is  quite  recent.  When  Emerson  was  born,  the  theory 
of  universal  gravitation  had  been  established  only  one  hun 
dred  and  eighteen  years;  and  the  literature  read  by  a  man 
like  him,  who  took  all  knowledge  for  his  province,  is  full  of 
the  old  imagery.  It  is  in  nearly  all  our  great  poets, — Chaucer, 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


Shakespeare,  Milton.*  Tennyson  is  the  first  eminent  poet  in 
whose  work  no  trace  of  the  old  Ptolemaic  terminology  ap 
pears.  But  not  to  go  too  far  afield,  we  have  here  only  to  note 
that  in  Ptolemy's  scheme  the  eight  planets  of  his  day  (we  now 
count  between  three  and  four  hundred)  each  swiftly  revolved 
in  a  rigid  transparent  sphere,  or  crystalline  shell,  in  which  it 
was  immovably  set,  and  that  through  each  shell  of  the  con 
centric  whole  the  motions  of  the  other  planets  set  in  the 
other  shells  could  be  discerned.  These  huge  hyaline  domes 
revolving  above  our  heads  were  as  invisible  as  air,  of  course; 
no  one  had  seen  them.  The  fixed  stars  were  thickly  im 
bedded  in  the  ninth  shell,  or  sphere.  Over  all  was  the  tenth 
sphere,  or  primum  mobile,  which,  firmly  attached  to  the 
others,  formed  a  kind  of  driving-wheel  for  the  whole  globular 
Chinese  puzzle,  carrying  it  around  once  in  twenty-four  hours. 
The  number  of  spheres  differed  with  different  scholars. 
Dante's  was  a  nine-sphere  system,  and  \^s>  primum  mobile  was 
the  ninth  sphere  instead  of  the  tenth. 

THE  WHEEL  OF  BEING. 
Returning  to  Emerson's  "  Celestial  Love,"  and  reading  on, — 

"  Higher  far  into  the  pure  realm 
Over  sun  and  star, 
Over  the  flickering  Daemon  film 
Thou  must  mount  for  love," — 

you  discover  that  you  have  left  behind  and  far  down  the  sev 
eral  spheres,  and  are  in  what  corresponds  to  the  primum 
mobile  of  the  Ptolemaists  or  the  empyrean  of  Dante,  and  are 

"  In  a  region  where  the  wheel 
On  which  all  beings  ride 
Visibly  revolves; 
Where  the  starred  eternal  worm 
Girds  the  world  with  bound  and  term, 
Where  unlike  things  are  like,"  etc. 

Is  this  "  wheel  "  \htprimum  mobile  on  which  you  may  be  sup 
posed  to  be  looking  down  from  the  always  immovable  em- 

*  See  a  study  by  me  of  Shakespeare's  astronomy  in  Poet-lore  magazine  for  July,  1901. 


8  THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 

pyrean  ?  We  might  think  so  if,  knowing  Emerson's  Oriental 
studies,  we  had  not  our  eyes  sharpened  for  Hindoo  imagery 
in  his  lyric  oracles.  The  whirling  of  the  stars  athwart  the 
sky  of  night  early  suggested  to  the  Hindoos  the  wheel-symbol 
of  the  universe,  their  fire-wheel  myth.  I  think  I  have  put  my 
finger  on  the  very  passage  in  the  Rig  Veda  which  Emerson 
had  in  mind,—  ?,  e.,  the  lines  which  speak  of  "  the  triple-naved 
everlasting  Wheel  that  nothing  can  arrest,  on  which  repose  all 
beings"  ("Night  of  the  Gods,"  ii.  597).  I  find,  also,  in  the 
Smetaswatara  Upanishad,  that  the  Universal  Soul  is  spoken 
of  as  a  wheel.  Indeed,  it  is  a  frequently  used  symbol  in 
Brahminical  literature,  and  especially  common  in  Buddhistic 
books.  It  was  also  a  symbol  of  metempsychosis,  or  the  con 
tinuous  birth  of  individual  souls,  and  recalls  in  that  aspect 
of  it  a  curious  passage  of  Walt  Whitman's  "Song  of  Myself," 
which  appears  only  in  the  first  quarto  of  nearly  half  a  cen 
tury  ago: 

"  Eternity  lies   in  bottomless   reservoirs  ;   its    buckets  are 

rising  forever  and  ever, 
They  pour  and  they  pour  and  they  exhale  away." 

THE  "STARRED  ETERNAL  WORM." 
The  two  lines  of  Emerson  quoted  above — 

"  Where  the  starred  eternal  worm 
Girds  the  world  with  bound  and  term  " — 

are  unquestionably  the  most  difficult  in  the  whole  body  of 
his  poetry.  In  the  first  place,  let  us  define  one  or  two  terms. 
By  "worm"  he,  of  course,  means  serpent.  No  reader  of 
Chaucerian  or  Elizabethan  literature  needs  to  be  told  that 
"  worm  "  is  time  and  again  used  as  a  synonym  for  "  serpent " 
by  writers  of  those  epochs.  As  for  "  world,"  it  is  probably 
used  in  its  old  sense  of  "universe,"  a  meaning  which  sur 
vives  the  time  when  the  Ptolemaic  theory  was  prevalent, 
and  the  earth  was  spoken  of  as  "  this  center "  (as  so  often 
in  Shakespeare),  and  "  world  "  and  "  universe  "  were  synony 
mous  terms,  the  stars  revolving  about  the  earth,  and  being 
subordinate  to  it.  But  what  is  "  the  starred  eternal  worm  "  ? 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


Not,  apparently,  the  Midgard  Serpent  of  Norse  mythology, 
which  lay  at  the  bottom  of  the  sea,  coiled  about  the  Midgard, 
or  earth  ;  and  not  the  constellation  of  "Ophiucus  huge,"  the 
serpent  of  the  northern  sky  ;  nor  Milky  Way  coiled  about  the 
earth.  It  is  in  the  stupendous  serpent-god  Sesha  of  the  Hin 
doos  that  I  find  a  more  probable  clew.  Sesha  is  described 
in  H.  H.  Wilson's  translation  of  the  Vishnu  Purana  (pp.  204- 
206),  which  we  know  Emerson  used  for  his  poem  "  Hama- 
treya,"  as  a  thousand-headed  serpent  floating  on  the  fathom 
less  sea  of  immensity ;  on  these  heads  of  Sesha,  Vishnu 
sleeps  in  the  intervals  of  his  creative  activity.  "  Sesha,"  says 
the  Purana,  "  bears  the  entire  world,  like  a  diadem,  upon  his 
head,  and  he  is  the  foundation  on  which  the  seven  Patalas 
[under  regions]  rest.  His  power,  his  glory,  his  form,  his  na 
ture,  cannot  be  described,  cannot  be  comprehended,  by  the 
gods  themselves."  This  divinity  taught  astronomy  to  the 
sage  Garga.  "The  thousand  jewels  in  his  crests  give  light 
to  all  the  regions";  "he  shines  like  the  white  mountains 
topped  with  flame."  Coiled  about  the  universe,  his  head 
blazing  with  innumerable  lights,  this  serpent  is  clearly  the 
"  starred  eternal  worm  "  Emerson  vaguely  limns. 

As  disembodied  spirits,  then,  swift-winged  as  light,  we  are 
sweeping  on  through  the  sunny  JEon ;  far  down,  the  little 
glow-worm  lamp  of  earth  recedes  with  its  insect  hum  about 
good  and  evil.  We  are  in  a  region 

"  Where  good  and  ill, 
And  joy  and  moan, 
Melt  into  one. 

Their  Past,  Present,  Future  shoot 
Triple  blossoms  from  one  root ; 
Substances  at  base  divided 
In  their  summits  are  united." 

In  the  fourth  and  fifth  of  these  lines  we  have,  curiously, 
the  exact  converse  of  the  Norse  idea.  In  Scandinavian  my 
thology  the  ash  Ygdrasil  (the  tree  of  existence)  rises  from 
three  fountain-nourished  roots  which  symbolize  what  was 
done,  what  is  done,  and  what  will  be  done  ;  while  in  Emer- 


10  THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 

son  there  is  one  root  to  the  tree  of  existence  and  its  three 
blossoming  branches  shoot  downward,  so  to  speak,  from  the 
empyrean.  So  in  the  Katha  Upanishad  (from  which,  as  we  shall 
see,  Emerson  quarried  his  "  Brahma  "  poem)  the  sixth  "  Valli  " 
begins,  "  It  [the  world]  is  like  an  eternal  holy  fig-tree,  whose 
root  is  upwards  and  whose  branches  go  downward  "  (Bibli- 
otheca  Indicd).  But  in  the  last  two  lines  above  quoted 
Emerson  reverses  his  image,  and  then  it  tallies  the  Norse 
idea.  All  four  lines  simply  mean,  of  course,  that  to  the 
Absolute  Being  there  is  no  past,  no  present,  no  future,  no  good, 
no  evil.  A  little  farther  on  in  the  poem  we  have  an  allusion  to 
Plato's  world  of  perfect  types,  and  a  hint  that  the  "  gods  " 
have  no  real  existence  apart  from  the  Supreme. 

This  mystic  dithyramb  closes  with  two  lines  which  are  ob 
scure  only  to  those  unread  in  Emerson's  prose  : 
"The  circles  of  that  sea  are  laws 
Which  publish  and  which  hide  the  cause." 

A  law  is  an  abstract  idea  or  generalization  to  express  the 
regular  succession  of  any  set  of  phenomena.  "Circles,"  in 
the  Emersonian  terminology,  mean  the  eternal  laws  of  pro 
gression,  the  growth  of  thought  and  action  outward  and  on 
ward  in  ever-widening  sweep.  In  the  realm  of  the  absolute 
(he  says  in  the  lines  we  are  considering)  the  methods  of  de 
velopment,  the  mode  of  manifestation,  of  the  hidden  Cause 
are  laws  which  announce  that  a  cause  is  there,  yet  also  serve 
as  an  Isis  veil  drawn  forever  over  the  Unrevealable. 

BRAHMA. 

In  1886  I  discovered  in  a  volume  of  the  Bibliotheca  Indica 
(Calcutta,  1852)  the  particular  translation  of  the  Katha 
Upanishad  used  by  Emerson  in  writing  his  "  Brahma. "  This 
poem  saw  the  light  in  the  first  issue  of  the  A  tlantic  Monthly 
in  1857.  In  Vol.  XV.  No.  41  of  the  Bibliotheca  may  be 
read : — 

"  If  the  slayer  thinks  I  slay,  if  the  slain  thinks  I  am  slain, 
then  both  of  them  do  not  know  well.  It  [the  soul]  does  not 
slay  nor  is  it  slain." 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


Emerson's  stanza  reads, — 

"  If  the  red  slayer  think  he  slays, 

Or  if  the  slain  think  he  is  slain, 
They  know  not  well  the  subtle  ways 
I  keep  and  pass,  and  turn  again." 

In  other  Upanishads — e.  g.,  the  Isa — in  the  same  volume,  you 
will  find  other  sentiments  expressed  in  "  Brahma,"  and  in  al 
most  the  identical  words.  Dr.  William  T.  Harris  finds  the 
source  of  "  Brahma  "  in  the  second  chapter  of  the  Bhagavad- 
gita.  This  work  is  a  dialogue  between  Krishna  and  the 
warrior  Arjuna,  which  embodies,  it  is  true,  the  doctrines  of 
the  Vedic  Upanishads  written  two  thousand  years  previous, 
and  which  virtually  quotes  the  passage  above  given  from  the 
Katha  Upanishad.  But  the  English  translation  quoted  by 
Dr.  Harris  contains  few  or  no  words  used  by  Emerson  in  his 
poem.  It  reads  :  "  He  who  believes  that  this  spirit  can  kill, 
and  he  who  thinks  that  it  can  be  killed,  both  of  these  are 
wrong  in  judgment."  Nor  in  any  other  citations  does  Dr. 
Harris  show  much,  if  any,  closer  identity  between  Emerson's 
poem  and  the  Bhagavadgita  selections  than  a  general  re 
semblance  in  thought.  But  listen  to  what  the  Calcutta  trans 
lation  says  of  Self :  "  It  is  far  beyond  what  is  far  and  near 
here."  Emerson  :  "  Far  or  forgot  to  me  is  near."  The 
Upanishad  says  :  "  If  Brahma  is  known  to  be  the  nature  of 
every  thought,  he  is  comprehended."  Emerson  :  "  I  am  the 
doubter  and  the  doubt."  The  Upanishad  says  :  "  Sitting,  it 
[the  soul]  goes  afar;  sleeping,  it  goes  everywhere."  Emer 
son  (in  the  "  Song  of  Nature  "): 

"  I  rest  on  the  pitch  of  the  torrent, 
In  slumber  I  am  strong." 

Dr.  Harris  reminds  us,  in  the  volume  published  by  the 
Concord  School  of  Philosophy,  that  "  the  red  slayer "  is  a 
member  of  the  Kshatriyas,  the  warrior  caste  of  India  ;  that 
"the  strong  gods"  of  the  poem  are  Indra,  Agni,  and  Yama  ; 
and  "the  sacred  seven  "  are  the  seven  Maharshis,  or  highest 
saints. 


AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


Nothing  could  better  show  how  mystified  the  practical 
New  England  business  man  was  (and  is)  by  the  metaphysics 
of  "  Brahma  "  than  the  incident  told  by  Dr.  Cyrus  A.  Bartol 
(in  the  Critic,  1888)  to  the  effect  that,  when  Emerson's  pub 
lishers  were  about  to  issue  his  Selected  Poems  in  1876,  they 
asked  him  to  omit  "  Brahma,"  because  it  had  excited  such 
ridicule  !  He  firmly  insisted  that  it  must  be  retained,  what 
ever  else  went  by  the  board.  To  the  Hindoo,  of  the  reader 
of  Hindoo  scriptures,  "  Brahma  "  is  only  an  elementary  primer 
of  metaphysics. 

THE  SPHINX. 

Emerson's  "  Sphinx  "  was  published  first  in  the  Dial  in 
1841.  His  winged  Sphinx  of  course  stands  for  Nature,  and 
her  prototype  is  not  one  of  the  Egyptian  sphinxes 
(which  were  never  winged  and  were  merely  symbolical 
creatures),  but  the  riddle-propounding  Sphinx,  the  winged 
lion  with  the  face  and  intelligence  of  a  woman,  sent  by 
Hera  to  ravage  the  territory  of  the  Thebans.  She  exists 
in  sculpture  to  this  day,  with  her  thick  sensual  lips 
("The  old  Sphinx  bit  her  thick  lip,"  says  Emerson).  That 
he  had  in  mind  as  the  basis  of  his  metaphor  a  sculptured 
form  of  the  Theban  Sphinx  is  shown  in  a  line  of  the 
poem,  —  "And  crouched  no  more  in  stone,"  —  unless,  indeed, 
we  infer  that  he  for  a  moment  forgot,  and  confused 
the  Theban  Sphinx  with  the  famous  thick-lipped  colossus 
near  the  Pyramid  of  Gizeh.  But  then  this  is  an  andro- 
sphinx,  or  male,  while  his  is  female.  This  cruel  mythical 
monster  was  wont,  it  will  be  remembered,  to  sit  on  a  hill  by 
the  roadside  in  Theban  territory,  and  as  often  as  the  Greeks 
failed  in  their  attempts  to  answer  her  riddle  she  carried  off 
one  of  their  number  and  devoured  him.  The  riddle  "  What 
animal  is  at  once  four-footed,  two-footed,  and  three-footed, 
and  is  weakest  when  it  has  most  feet  ?  "  was  answered  by 
(Edipus,  who  replied  that  it  was  man,  who  creeps  upon  all- 
fours  when  an  infant  and  carries  a  cane  when  old.  When  her 
secret  was  discovered,  the  Sphinx  flung  herself  headlong 
from  the  hill  and  perished.  This  story  applies  very  well  to 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR  13 

Nature,  who  devours  her  children  one  by  one, — only  her  rid 
dle  is  forever  unanswered.  In  the  poem  the  drowsy  old  dame, 
who  has  nodded  and  nodded  through  the  centuries,  calls  for 
some  one  to  tell  her  secret.  A  poet  takes  up  her  challenge, 
and,  setting  the  slug-horn  to  his  lips,  peals  a  jubilant  reply, — 
that  Love  working  at  the  centre  of  things  and  underneath  all 
is  the  key.  In  the  dual  of  wits  between  the  Sphinx  and  the 
Poet  we  are  scarcely  left  in  doubt  as  to  which  is  victorious, 
for  the  Sphinx  sarcastically  remarks  that  no  one  has  yet  told 
one  of  her  meanings.  ("  Her  secret  is  untold.  Many  and 
many  an  CEdipus  arrives;  he  has  the  whole  mystery  teeming 
in  his  brain.  Alas  !  ...  no  syllable  can  he  shape  on  his 
lips,"  says  Emerson,  in  "  Nature.").  Having  thus  delivered 
herself,  she  kicks  up  her  heels,  and  departs  with  a  grin  of 
malicious  humor  on  her  face.  As  she  goes,  the  poet  turns  his 
magic  tube  of  Prince  Ahmed  and  sees  her  metamorphosed 
into  star,  cloud,  mountain,  and  wave.  We  are  left  to  infer 
that,  like  her  prototype,  she  gobbled  the  poet  sooner  or  later. 
For  she  had  reminded  him  that  instead  of  answering  the 
question-riddle  with  his  reply  of  Love  at  the  centre  he  was  not 
competent  to  reply  at  all,  since  he  was  but  a  part  of  her  (Na 
ture)  and  so  a  part  of  the  riddle-question  or  mystery  itself. 
If  he  could  only  see  and  really  know  his  physical  eye,  know 
that  it  only  belonged  to  the  phenomenal,  or  illusory,  world, 
he  would  know  that  a  solution  obtained  by  means  of  its  re 
ports  could  not  be  of  absolute  value.  She  then  gives  utter 
ance  to  what  is  probably  the  profoundest  expression  of  pure 
Kantian  idealism  ever  made  in  poetry: — 

"  So  take  thy  quest  through  nature, 

It  through  thousand  natures  ply; 
Ask  on,  thou  clothed  eternity; 
Time  is  the  false  reply." 

The  lines  sum  up  all  the  philosophies:  The  may  a  of  the  Hin 
doos  is  here,  the  Berkeleyan  idealism,  the  Fichtean  egoism, 
and  the  Spencerian  agnosticism.  Because  that  fragment  of 
the  Infinite  Soul  is  swathed  about  with  maya,  or  nature,  it 
cannot  understand  the  Noumenon,  the  real.  Only  the  Bound- 


14  THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 

less,  the  Causeless,  can  comprehend  itself ;  the  clothed,  or 
embodied,  fragments  of  it  cannot  do  so.  Except  this  bit  of 
philosophical  idealism  and  a  statement  of  the  polarity  of 
atoms,  there  is  really  nothing  obscure,  even  to  a  mere  tyro  in 
philosophy;  a  Freshman  can  see  through  the  tropes  that  an 
nounce  that  matter  and  spirit,  the  objective  and  the  subjec 
tive,  are  one. 

"  Ever  the  Rock  of  Ages  melts 

Into  the  mineral  air, 
To  be  the  quarry  whence  to  build 
Thought  and  its  mansions  fair." 

Two  or  three  stanzas  of  "  The  Sphinx  "  were  amended  after 
the  first  publication.  The  line  "  Rue,  myrrh,  and  cummin  for 
the  Sphinx,"  was  originally  "  Hemlock  and  vitriol  for  the 
Sphinx,"  her  muddy  eyes  to  clear.  This  was  a  little  too 
rough  on  the  poor  old  cummer.  The  words  substituted  are 
all  carefully  chosen,  and  are  names  of  tonic  or  stimulating 
preparations.  In  the  last  verse-group  but  one,  for  the  lines 

"  She  melted  into  purple  cloud, 
She  silvered  in  the  moon," 

one  is  astonished  and  amused  to  read  in  the  form  the  verse 
has  in  the  Dial  the  following: — 

"  She  hopped  into  the  baby's  eyes, 
She  hopped  into  the  moon  "  ! 

This  was  one  of  those  quaint  caprices  and  audacious  half 
sportivejeux  d' esprit  with  which  Emerson  as  lecturer  and  poet 
was  wont  to  startle  people.  But  it  had  a  bathetic  effect,  and 
he  removed  it.  The  line  "To  insight  profounder"  at  first 
read  "  Profounder,  profounder." 

MERLIN. 

At  the  close  of  the  second  part  of  "  Merlin  "  are  some  won 
derful  lines,  which  years  ago  I  tried  to  interpret.  I  now  see 
that  my  interpretation  was  wrong.  The  lines  are  these  : — 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR  15 

"  Subtle  rhymes  with  ruin  rife 
Murmur  in  the  house  of  life, 
Sung  by  the  Sisters  as  they  spin  ; 
In  perfect  time  and  measure  they 
Build  and  unbuild  our  echoing  clay, 
As  the  two  twilights  of  the  day 
Fold  us  music-drunken  in." 

The  "  house  of  life  "  is  not  the  world,  or  Nature,  as  I  hastily 
concluded,  but  man's  body.  Compare  this  stanza  from  W.  R. 
Alger's  Specimens  of  Oriental  Poetry: — 

"A  pilgrim  through  eternity 
In  countless  births  have  I  been  born, 
And  toiled  the  Architect  to  see 
Who  builds  my  soul's  live  house  in  scorn." 

In  the  first  part  of  "  Merlin,"  Emerson  had  drawn  a  picture 
of  the  kingly  bard  who  does  not  give  his  time  chiefly  to  the 
petty  counting  of  feet  and  the  jingling  of  rhymes  ;  "  he  shall 
aye  climb  for  his  rhyme."  *  In  the  second  part  he  shows  how, 
nevertheless,  rhyme  runs  through  Nature  :  everything  is 
paired,  leaf  with  leaf,  hand  with  hand,  thought  with  thought, 
and, 

"  Perfect-paired  as  eagle's  wings, 
Justice  is  the  rhyme  of  things." 

Then,  finally,  he  adds  that,  even  in  our  bodies,  the  waste  and 
repair  of  the  tissues,  the  building  and  unbuilding  of  the  clay 
by  the  Parcae,  or  Fates,  goes  on  in  a  kind  of  measure  and 
rhyme,  a  music  so  rhythmic  that  you  fancy  you  hear  the 
"  echoing  "  of  the  atoms  as  they  dance,  "  Rhyme  the  pipe,  and 
Time  the  warder."  In  the  preceding  portion  of  Part  II  he 
has  already  passed  in  review  the  macrocosm  and  shown  the 
universality  of  rhyme.  Then  he  closes  by  looking  into  the 
microcosm — man — and  finds  the  same  music  there.  As  in 
Prospero's  island,  earth  and  air  and  our  very  bodies  are  full 
of  music,  and  "  the  two  twilights  of  the  day,"  dawn  and  dusk, 
"  Fold  us  music-drunken  in." 


16  THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 

If  any  one,  by  the  way,  wonder  why  Merlin  is  chosen  as 
the  type  of  a  poet  by  Emerson,  he  must  remember  that 
Merlin  (or  Myrdhinn)  figures  both  as  the  enchanter  of  the 
Arthurian  romances  and  as  a  Welsh,  bard.  Mr.  Emerson's 
son  tells  us  that  his  father  read  the  existing  fragments  of  old 
Myrdhinn,  the  bard,  and  enjoyed  them. 

THE  NUN'S  ASPIRATION. 

I  am  almost  ashamed  to  say  that,  until  my  friend  William 
Rounseville  Alger  called  my  attention  to  Emerson's  "  Nun's 
Aspiration,"  I  had  wholly  missed  the  marvelous  Uranian 
imagery,  the  subtle  mysticism,  of  the  latter  half  of  that  poem, 
owing,  I  suppose,  to  the  extreme  and  deceptive  simplicity  of 
the  diction  and  the  condensation  of  thought.  (Mr.  Alger 
showed  me  in  MS.  three  or  four  quarto  pages  of  an  attempted 
interpretation  by  a  well-known  speculative  philosopher  which 
I  thought  a  mere  darkening  of  counsel).  The  Nun,  tired  of 
the  conditioned  life,  apostrophizes  Time,  saluting  him  as  she 
passes  out  at  the  close  of  mortal  life  into  infinite  space, — 

"  Which  mocks  thy  aeons  to  embrace  ; 
./Eons  which  tardily  unfold 
Realm  beyond  realm, — extent  untold  ; 
No  early  morn,  no  evening  late, — 
Realms  self -upheld,  disdaining  Fate, 
Whose  shining  sons,  too  great  for  fame, 
Never  heard  thy  weary  name  ; 
Nor  lives  the  tragic  bard  to  say 
How  drear  the  part  I  held  in  one, 
How  lame  the  other  limped  away." 

What  a  marvelous  attempt  is  this  to  picture  Eternity  !  The 
pied  wings  of  Time  droop  wearily  as  they  beat  the  infinite 
void  of  space  and  never  reach  its  bounds.  The  only  obscur 
ity  is  in  the  last  two  lines,  where  the  second  person  is  dropped, — 
as  if  the  lines  were  an  after  thought,  almost.  But  the  idea  is 
clear  to  me.  The  last  line  refers  to  time,  the  next  to  the 
last  to  space  ;  that  is  all. 


THH  AMERICAN  AUTHOR  17 

EXPERIENCE. 

There  are  some  cryptic  thoughts  in  Emerson's  lines  on 
Experience  which  emerge  from  their  obscurity  when  we  pass 
into  them  certain  Rontgen  rays  from  the  prose  essay  to  which 
they  were  originally  prefixed.  In  my  own  well-worn  pocket 
edition  of  the  poems  I  have  written  over  these  Delphic  verses 
the  key-words,  "  Mind  is  King." 

"  The  lords  of  life,  the  lords  of  life,— 
I  saw  them  pass, 
In  their  own  guise, 
Like  and  unlike, 
Portly  and  grim, — 
Use  and  Surprise, 
Surface  and  Dream, 
Succession  swift  and  Spectral  Wrong, 
Temperament  without  a  tongue, 
And  the  inventor  of  the  game 
Omnipresent  without  name; — 
Some  to  see,  some  to  be  guessed, 
They  marched  from  east  to  west: 
Little  man,  least  of  all, 
Among  the  legs  of  his  guardians  tall, 
Walked  about  with  puzzled  look; 
Him  by  the  hand  dear  Nature  took, 
Dearest  Nature,  strong  and  kind, 
Whispered,  '  Darling,  never  mind  ! 
To-morrow  they  will  wear  another  face, 
The  founder  thou;  these  are  thy  race  ! ' ' 

Emerson,  from  his  tripod,  gives  us  here  a  kind  of  masque 
to  shadow  forth  the  underlying  thought  of  his  knotty  and 
incoherent  essay  with  the  same  title, — that  mind,  the  soul,  is 
the  only  real  existence,  the  world  of  experience  only  phantas- 
magorial,  illusory;  as  we  look  at  it  through  the  colored  lenses 
of  our  moods,  we  paint  it  with  our  own  hues;  Nature  likes  to 
mystify  us;  we  walk  as  in  a  dream,  souls  never  getting  into 


18  THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 

actual  contact  with  their  objects.  At  the  close  of  the  essay 
he  sums  up  as  follows:  "  Illusion,  Temperament,  Succession, 
Reality,  Subjectiveness, — these  are  the  threads  on  the  loom 
of  time,  these  are  the  lords  of  life."  But,  although  these 
grave-faced  giants  lord  it  over  little  man,  yet  by  virtue  of  his 
soul-identity  with  the  All -soul,  and  speaking  in  its  name,  he 
can  proudly  claim  to  be  their  creator.  Wrong  is  called  "  spec 
tral  "  in  the  poem  because,  in  Emerson's  opinion,  evil  is  only 
apparent,  eventuates  in  good.  "Temperament"  is  tongue- 
less;  it  cannot  describe  itself  in  words  or  be  described;  it 
colors  your  life  and  makes  you  what  you  are,  gives  you  your 
individuality;  you  inherit  it  and  it  gives  the  fatal  limit  to 
your  powers.  But  as  in  the  essay  he  escapes  at  the  close  into 
moral  freedom  through  the  door  of  the  will  opening  into  the 
Infinite  Will,  so  in  the  poem  he  closes  with  the  thought  that 
the  Soul  may  be  deemed  to  be  the  master  even  of  Tempera 
ment,  since  Temperament  is  its  creature.  The  idea  in  the 
phrase  "The  inventor  of  the  game  Omnipresent  without 
name  "  is  rather  obscure,  but  not  unintelligible.  The  game 
is,  I  suppose,  the  game  of  life,  the  game  of  ghosts,  or  rather 
of  the  one  Ghost  in  multitudinous  forms, — the  omnipresent 
Will  executing  itself  in  time  and  space.  Tennyson  cries,  "  Do 
we  move  ourselves,  or  are  moved  by  an  unseen  hand  at  a 
game?"  Emerson  sees  and  says  that  we  and  that  which 
moves  us  are  one  organically  connected  power.  In  this  very 
essay  on  Experience  he  affirms,  "  I  would  allow  the  most  to 
the  will  of  man,  but  I  have  set  my  heart  on  honesty  in  this 
chapter,  and  I  can  see  nothing  at  last,  in  success  or  failure, 
than  more  or  less  of  vital  force  supplied  from  the  Eternal." 
But  at  any  rate  the  inventor  and  the  game  are  nameless.  The 
living  Universe,  in  its  Dei'aneira-robe  of  flame,  whirls  on  and 
on  through  immensity,  the  atoms  of  its  body  bright  a  maze 
of  flashing  wheels  and  orbs,  "  boundless  inward  in  the  atom, 
boundless  outward  in  the  whole,"  self-moving,  and  on  the 
surface  of  its  cooled  atom-globes  now  masquerading  for  a 
million  years  for  sport  in  fantastic  sauroids  and  ferns,  and 
now  flinging  its  essence  into  the  brain  of  a  Shakespeare  or  a 
Plato  and  weaving  on  silent  loom  a  bunch  of  lilies  or  a  sun- 


THH  AMERICAN  AUTHOR  19 

set  sky.  But  what  the  end,  the  motive  of  it  all  is  (and  there 
seems  to  be  one),  we  know  not  at  all.  We  call  it  the  game  of 
life.  Yet  that  explains  nothing1. 

The  dread  "  Inventor  "  of  the  game  is  classed  by  Emerson 
with  the  other  lords  of  life,  or  related  to  them,  in  this  way,  I 
think  :  The  word  "  Subjectiveness,"  in  the  essay-summary 
quoted  above,  seems  plainly  to  tally  the  word  "inventor"  in  the 
poem.  By  subjectivity,  in  the  essay,  he  means  first  the  seeing 
things,  not  as  they  are  in  themselves,  but  as  they  seem  when 
filtered  through  our  moods.  Then  he  personifies  this  subjective- 
ness  as  one  of  the  lords  of  life,  and  in  the  poem  sinks  the  plum 
met  still  deeper,  and,  identifying  the  subjective  in  man  with  the 
All-soul  and  with  "  Reality,"  speaks  of  it  as  the  inventor  of 
the  game  of  life.  Considered  as  a  mere  terrestrial  entity, 
may  this  Osiris  upstaring  in  all  eyes,  this  soul,  this  "  Ideal 
journeying  always  with  us,"  be  regarded  as  coordinate  with 
the  other  lords  of  life, — Use  and  Surprise.  Surface  and 
Dream  ?  Or  rather  is  it  not  regarded  as  the  "  founder  "  and 
master  of  these  ?  Emerson  certainly  seems  in  the  last  line 
of  his  verses  to  coordinate  it  with  the  rest.  His  veiled 
phantom,  the  Inventor,  appears  in  the  procession  with  the 
other  powers  of  nature,  and  seems  in  truth  to  be  the  Absolute 
Soul  in  masque,  the  Soul  in  one  of  its  demiurgic  manifesta 
tions.  If  so,  then  the  soul  of  man  by  virtue  of  its  vital 
psychic  union  with  the  whole  of  the  Absolute  Soul  is  lord  of 
this  dread  Inventor  also,  as  well  as  of  the  other  powers  of 
life.  (Compare  the  close  of  the  mystic  oracle  in  "Initial 
Daemonic,  and  Celestial  Love,"  beginning  "Higher  far  into 
the  pure  realm.") 

In  making  his  guardians  tall  move  from  east  to  west, 
Emerson  hints,  I  suppose,  at  the  fact  that  the  march  of 
intellect  has  steadily  been  from  Orient  to  Occident.  It  is 
only  in  our  own  day  that  the  great  trek  has  ended,  and  we 
now  stand,  with  hand  over  eyes,  gazing  far  over  the  blue 
Pacific  to  the  ancestral  home  whence  ages  ago  we  set  out. 

The  phantasmal  lords  of  life  of  this  poem  "  Experience  " 
were  presumably  suggested  to  Emerson  by  the  following 
lines  from  Tennyson's  "Mystic,"  published  in  1830  (Emerson 


20  THH  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 

imported  these  early  volumets  of  young  Tennyson,  and  never 
tired  of  praising  them  to  his  friends): — 

"  Always  there  stood  before  him,  night  and  day, 
Of  wayward  vary-colored  circumstance 
The  imperishable  presences  serene, 
Colossal,  without  form,  or  sense,  or  sound, 
Dim  shadows  but  unwaning  presences 
Four-fac£d  to  four  corners  of  the  sky." 

The  "silent  congregated  hours,"  "daughters  of  time, 
divinely  tall,"  with  "  severe  and  youthful  brows,"  in  this  same 
poem  of  Tennyson  gave  Emerson  his  "daughters  of  Time, 
the  hypocritic  Days,"  congregated  in  procession.  Tennyson's 
mystic,  who  hears  "time  flowing  in  the  middle  of  the  night/' 
recalls  Emerson's  "Two  Rivers,"  in  which  the  living  All, 
the  Infinite  Soul,  is  figured  as  a  stream  flowing  through 
eternity : — 

"  I  hear  the  spending  of  the  stream, 
Through  years,  through  men,  through  nature  fleet, 
Through  love  and  thought,  through  power  and  dream." 

WEALTH. 

At  the  close  of  the  poem  "  Wealth  "  there  is  a  bit  of  scien 
tific  nature-ethics  which  is  a  little  obscure.  The  greater  part 
of  the  poem  is  a  series  of  graphic  pictures,  detailing  the 
process  of  world-development  through  the  geologic  ages 
down  to  the  advent  of  man.  Suddenly,  at  the  end, — just  as 
at  the  end  of  the  prose  essay  on  the  same  subject, — he  remem 
bers  his  manners  and  makes  his  bow  to  the  august  Soul,  kin 
dles  a  light  in  the  Geissler  tube  of  nature,  sets  it  aglow  inte 
riorly  with  spiritual  law: — 

"  But,  though  light-headed  man  forget, 
Remembering  Matter  pays  her  debt: 
Still,  through  her  motes  and  masses,  draw 
Electric  thrills  and  ties  of  Law, 
Which  bind  the  strength  of  Nature  wild 
To  the  conscience  of  a  child." 


THH  AM  URIC  AN  AUTHOR  21 

The  logical  link  connecting  this  part  with  the  rest  has 
dropped  out  in  the  poem,  but  is  clear  enough  in  the  essay. 
The  lines  mean  simply  this  :  that,  though  man  may  forget  to 
obey  the  laws  of  the  universe,  Nature  never  forgets  her  debt 
of  obedience;  she  bites  and  stings  the  transgressor  and  caresses 
and  soothes  him  who  obeys.  In  her  own  submission  to  law 
she  has  that  artlessness  and  quasi-moral  sense  that  affines 
her  to  the  moral  nature  of  a  child.  The  "  awful  victors  "  and 
"  Eternal  Rights  "  of  "  Voluntaries  "  are  only  "  remembering 
Matter"  in  another  mask:  with  all  their  innocent  obedience 
they  are  themselves  terrible  executors: — 

"  They  reach  no  term,  they  never  sleep, 
In  equal  strength  through  space  abide; 
Though,  feigning  dwarfs,  they  crouch  and  creep, 
The  strong  they  slay,  the  swift  outstride." 

GOD  is  ALL. 

In  the  following  high  pantheistic  strain  the  seer  chants 
the  old  rune  that  God  is  all: — 

"  The  living  Heaven  thy  prayers  respect, 
House  at  once  and  architect, 
Quarrying  man's  rejected  hours, 
Builds  therewith  eternal  towers; 
Sole  and  self-commanded  works, 
Fears  not  undermining  days, 
Grows  by  decays, 

And,  by  the  famous  might  that  lurks 
In  reaction  and  recoil, 
Makes  flame  to  freeze  and  ice  to  boil; 
Forging,  through  swart  arms  of  Offence, 
The  silver  seat  of  Innocence." 

Spiritual  Laws. 

When  the  Living  Universe  builds  a  house,  it  builds  it  out 
of  its  own  soul  substance;  while  man  sleeps  and  loiters,  the 
Unconscious  ceaselessly  toils.  In  the  phrase  "grows  by 
decays,"  Emerson  embodies,  I  believe,  the  law  of  the  conser 
vation  of  energy.  The  magazine  of  divine  power  is  exhaust- 


22  THE,  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 

less;  does  energy  sink  out  of  sight  here,  it  is  only  to  reappear 
yonder;  the  tree  decays,  but  out  of  its  fertilizing  substance 
new  plants  may  spring  up;  the  coal  under  the  steam  boiler  of 
the  locomotive  is  consumed,  but  the  swart  goblin  has  lost  no 
wit  of  his  might:  he  just  slips  darkling  up  into  the  stream, 
makes  the  driving-rods  his  swift-shuttling  arms,  and,  grasping 
with  his  steel  fingers  the  felloes  of  the  wheel,  whirls  you  half 
a  thousand  miles  over  the  green  bulge  of  the  earth  ere  set  of 
sun.  The  mystic  Power  grows  by  decays;  and  also,  by  "  the 
famous  might  that  lurks  in  reaction  and  recoil,"  reconciles 
apparent  antinomies  and  opposites,  and  is  the  agent  that 
visits  evil  upon  the  head  of  the  evil  doer  and  mercy  upon  the 
merciful.  If  a  heavy  body  be  rolled  up  an  inclined  plane,  it 
acquires  potential  and  kinetic  energy  just  equal  to  the  force 
expended  in  getting  it  there,  and  in  reaction  develops  such  a 
famous  might  that,  if  massive  enough,  it  will  knock  you 
down  if  you  stand  in  its  way.  If  you  lift  the  big  pendulum  of 
the  clock  in  the  corner,  you  also  confer  latent,  or  reactionary, 
energy  upon  it.  Only  it  is  of  course  hyperbolical  for  the  poet 
to  say  that  reaction  is  potent  enough  to  actually  freeze  flame 
and  make  ice  boil  your  kettle.  That  is  only  one  of  Emerson's 
rhetorical  Chinese  crackers,  his  startling  thaumaturgic  way  of 
illustrating  his  thesis. 

The  key-thought  of  the  essay  "  Spiritual  Laws,"  to  which 
the  occult  lines  we  are  considering  were  prefixed,  is,  Be 
noble  ;  for,  if  you  are  not,  your  face  and  life  will,  by  the  law 
of  reaction  and  return,  publish  your  lapse.  Punishment  and 
reward  are  fruits  that  ripen  unsuspected  in  the  deeds  of 
men. 

MEROPS. 

The  pertinency  and  application  of  many  of  Emerson's 
titles  are  not  at  once  apparent.  I  am  indebted  to  a  private 
note  from  Prof.  Charles  Eliot  Norton  for  the  cue  to  Emer 
son's  "  Merops."  I  had  (I  believe,  erroneously)  been  trying 
to  connect  it  with  the  mythological  personage  Merops,  the 
putative  father  of  Phaethon.  But  it  evidently  is  used  in  its 
significance  as  a  common  noun,  its  meaning  in  Greek  being 
44  speaking,"  u  articulate." 


THH  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


ALPHONSO  OF  CASTILE. 

"  Alphonso  of  Castile  "  is  a  dramatic  monologue  containing 
a  whimsical  suggestion  for  compounding  a  Man  out  of  ordinary 
weak-timbered  manikins  by  killing  nine  in  ten  of  them  and 
"  stuffing  nine  brains  in  one  hat."  It  is  put  into  the 
mouth  of  Alphonso,  King  of  Castile,  born  in  1221,  called  El 
Sabio,  "  The  Wise."  He  was  a  man  who  suffered  much  in  his 
life.  He  wrote  a  famous  code  of  laws,  and  first  made  the 
Castilian  a  national  language  by  causing  the  Bible  to  be 
translated  into  it.  Emerson  chooses  him  as  the  vehicle  of  his 
own  whimsey  about  the  condensed  homunculus  chiefly  on  ac 
count  of  one  famous  sentence  attributed  to  him  :  "  Had  I 
been  present  at  the  creation,  I  could  have  given  some  useful 
hints  for  the  better  ordering  of  the  universe."  Emerson,  in 
his  rhymed  soliloquy,  put  into  Alphonso's  mouth,  sar 
castically  twits  Nature  with  her  depleted  stocks,  her  run  out- 
strains  of  lemons,  figs,  roses,  and  men.  The  remedy  pro 
posed  in  the  case  of  man,  and  outlined  above,  has  the  true 
Emerson-Swift  bouquet  or  race,  is  colored  and  veined  with  a 
right  Shakespearian  scorn  of  the  mob. 

MlTHRIDATES. 

"  Mithridates "  is  a  monologue  put  into  the  mouth  of 
Mithridates  the  Great,  King  of  Pontus,  who  is  said  to  have 
discovered  an  antidote  for  poisons  which  made  him  poison, 
proof  against  his  many  enemies: 

"  I  cannot  spare  water  or  wine, 

Tobacco-leaf,  or  poppy,  or  rose; 
From  the  earth-poles  to  the  line, 

All  between  that  works  or  grows, 
Everything  is  kin  of  mine. 

Give  me  agates  for  my  meat; 
Give  me  cantharids  to  eat; 
From  air  and  ocean  bring  me  foods, 
From  all  zones  and  altitudes." 

As  late  as  1787  "  mithridate  "  was  the  name  for  an  anti 
dote  against  poison  included  in  the  London  pharmacopoeia. 


THH  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


In  Jonson's  "  Every  Man  in  his  Humour,"  Kitely,  thinking  he 
is  poisoned,  calls  for  mithridate  and  oil.  It  was  composed  of 
many  ingredients  and  given  in  the  form  of  electuaries.  In 
our  modern  pharmacopoeias  we  have  plenty  of  antidotes 
against  virulent  poisons  ;  e.  g.,  atropine  for  the  deadly  ama- 
nita  mushroom.  And  counter-poisons  are  often  used,  as  the 
tincture  of  foxglove  for  aconite,  atropine  for  morphia,  or 
morphia  for  belladonna.  According  to  the  tradition,  Mithri- 
dates  gradually  inured  his  system  to  counter-poisons,  and  be 
came  poison-proof.  At  any  rate,  Emerson  uses  him  for  his 
metaphor,  which,  in  untropical  speech,  is  this  :  "  I  am  tired 
of  the  namby-pamby  and  goody-goody  ;  give  me  things 
strong  and  rank  ;  give  me  evil  for  a  change  and  a  spur." 

"  Too  long  shut  in  strait  and  few, 
Thinly  dieted  on  dew, 
I  will  use  the  world,  and  sift  it, 
To  a  thousand  humors  shift  it, 
As  you  spin  a  cherry. 
O  doleful  ghosts  and  goblins  merry  ! 
O  all  you  virtues,  methods,  mights, 
Means,  appliances,  delights, 

Reputed  wrongs  and  braggart  rights, 
Smug  routine,  and  things  allowed, 
Minorities,  things  under  cloud  ! 
Hither  !  take  ire,  use  me,  fill  me, 
Vein  and  artery,  though  ye  kill  me  !  " 

In  brief,  "  I  have  run  the  gauntlet  of  experience,  sounded  all 
the  depths  of  passion,  joy,  woe,  evil.  I  am  dipped  in  Styx, 
more  invulnerable  than  Siegfried,  and  strong  now  to  use  the 
world  and  be  used  by  it."  The  mood  of  the  poem  is  the  wild 
longing  that  sometimes  comes  over  the  good  man  to  break 
loose  and  have  his  fling,  come  what  may,  cry,  Vive  la  baga 
telle  /  or  run  amuck  and  tilt  at  all  he  meets.  It  is  needless 
to  say  that  the  staid  Emerson  never  carried  this  mood  farther 
than  to  smoke  a  cigar  now  and  then,  or  take  an  Adirondack 
outing.  His  contemporary,  the  untrammelled  Whitman, 


THB  AMERICAN  AUTHOR  25 

could  both  preach  and  practise  (within  the  bounds  of  reason) 
the  Mithridatic  doctrine ;  and  he  was  a  more  richly  experi 
enced  and  symmetrical  man  in  consequence. 

The  last  two  lines  of  "  Mithridates,"  as  printed  from  the 
autograph  copy,  were, — 

"  God  !  I  will  not  be  an  owl, 
But  sun  me  in  the  Capitol." 
These  lines  Emerson  wisely  dropped. 

FORERUNNERS. 

"  Forerunners  "  ("  Long  I  followed  happy  guides  ")  mean 
one's  brave  hopes  and  ideals  of  good  to  come,  our  dreams 
and  aspirations.  The  lines 

"  No  speed  of  mine  avails 

To  hunt  upon  their  shining  trails  " 

Thoreau  evidently  utilized  as  text  for  his  well-known  fable 
in  Walden  of  the  lost  hound,  bay  horse,  and  turtle-dove. 

HERMIONE. 

The  portrait  of  Hermione,  the  patient-sweet  wife  of  Leontes 
in  "The  Winter's  Tale"  of  Shakespeare,  serves  Emerson,  in 
his  poem  "  Hermione,"  as  the  model  of  a  perfect  wife,  and  a 
more  acceptable  one  to  this  age  than  Chaucer's  abject  Gri- 
selda.  Such  a  lady  as  Shakespeare's  Hermione,  beautiful  in 
person  and  of  rare  self-control  and  virtue,  is  an  adumbration 
or  epitome  of  the  universal  beauty.  Looking  at  nature,  the 
American  poet  finds  the  features  of  his  Hermione  there  : 
"  mountains  and  the  misty  plains,  Her  colossal  portraiture." 
I  suppose  that  this  sketch,  tender  and  delicately  toned  as  if 
with  a  silver  point,  is  autobiographical,  and  is  a  shadowing 
forth  of  the  character  of  Emerson's  first  wife,  the  ethereal- 
souled  Ellen  Tucker,  who  died  of  consumption  after  only  a 
year  and  a  half  of  married  life.  When  her  "  meteor  glances 
came,"  he  says,  he  was  "hermit  vowed  to  books  and  gloom," 
and  dwelling  alone.  In  the  lines 
"  The  chains  of  kind 
The  distant  bind ; 
Deed  thou  doest  she  must  do," 


26  THH  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 

he  anticipates  (does  he  not?)  the  telepathy  of  our  days, — 
kindred  minds  seeking  similar  places  and  thinking  like 
thoughts,  although  in  this  case,  to  be  sure,  the  kindred  soul  is 
thought  of  as  merged  with  the  inorganic  world, — the  winds 
and  waterfalls  and  twilight  nooks. 

THE  PERSIAN  TINGE  IN  EMERSON. 

Search  the  whole  world  through,  you  shall  find  no  prede 
cessor  of  Emerson  the  poet.  The  only  verse  resembling  his 
in  general  style  is  that  of  the  enigmatic  "  Phoenix  and  the 
Turtle,"  attributed  to  Shakespeare,  and  much  admired  by 
Emerson  : — 

"  Let  the  bird  of  loudest  lay, 
On  the  sole  Arabian  tree, 
Herald  sad  and  trumpet  be, 
To  whose  sound  chaste  wings  obey." 

Emerson's  verses  have  also  a  slight  Persian  tinge  now  and 
then,  caught  from  his  studies  of  Saadi  and  Hafiz.     In  his  fine 
lyric  cry  "  Bacchus,"  in  which  he  calls  for  a  wine  of  life,  a 
cup  of  divine  soma  or  amrita,  that  shall  sinew  his  brain  and 
exalt  all  his  powers  of  thought  and  action  to  a  godlike  pitch, — 
"  Bring  me  wine,  but  wine  which  never  grew 
In  the  belly  of  the  grape, 

That  I  intoxicated, 

And  by  the  draught  assimilated, 

May  float  at  pleasure  through  all  natures; 

Quickened  so,  will  I  unlock 

Every  crypt  of  every  rock," — 

he  unconsciously  gave  his  lines,  I  think,  the  outward  form  of 
some  verses  by  Hafiz,  in  which  that  singer  intimates  that, 
give  him  the  right  kind  of  wine,  and  he  can  perform  wonders 
as  if  with  Solomon's  ring  or  Jemschid's  wine-cup  mirror. 
Emerson  himself  in  one  of  his  early  editions  gives  a  spirited 
verse  translation  of  Hafiz's  poem.  Mr.  William  R.  Alger 
(Specimens  of  Oriental  Poetry,  Boston,  185*6)  translates  Hafiz 
thus : — 


THH  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


"  Bring  me  wine!     By  my  puissant  arm 
The  thick  net  of  deceit  and  of  harm 
Which  the  priests  have  spread  over  the  world 
Shall  be  rent  and  in  laughter  be  hurled. 
Bring  me  wine!     I  the  earth  will  subdue. 
Bring  me  wine!     I  the  heaven  will  storm  through. 
Bring  me  wine,  bring  it  quick,  make  no  halt! 
To  the  throne  of  both  worlds  will  I  vault. 
All  is  in  the  red  streamlet  divine. 
Bring  me  wine!    O  my  host,  bring  me  wine!  " 

ETIENNE  DE  LA  BOECE. 

"  Etienne  de  la  Bo£ce"  gets  its  title  (with  Emersonian  vari 
ations)  from  the  name  of  one  of  Montaigne's  most  intimate 
friends,  —  Estienne  de  la  Boetie.  Montaigne  tells  us  about 
him  in  chapter  xxvii  of  his  Essays,  affirming  that  he  would 
have  accomplished  miracles,  had  he  lived.  He  died  when 
only  thirty-three  at  Bordeaux  (1563).  His  scholarship  was 
solid,  his  translations  from  the  Greek  excellent.  He  was  so 
eager  to  read  Greek  that  he  copied  whole  volumes  with  his 
own  hand.  A  French  critic  says,  "  Les  qualit£s  que  brillaient 
en  lui  imprimaient  a  toutes  a  personne  un  cachet  distingu6  et 
un  charme  severe."  Yet  he  seems  to  have  been  something  of 
an  imitator  of  his  great  friend;  and  it  is  in  this  aspect  of  his 
life  that  Emerson  regards  him,  using  him,  perhaps  somewhat 
unjustly  to  his  powers  and  developing  genius,  as  the  type  of 
a  too  imitative  disciple:  — 

"  I  serve  you  not,  if  you  I  follow, 
Shadowlike,  o'er  hill  and  hollow; 

Vainly  valiant,  you  have  missed 

The  manhood  that  should  yours  resist." 

GUY. 

Probably  most  Americans,  if  asked  to  explain  the  rele 
vancy  of  the  title  of  Emerson's  poem  "  Guy,"  would  be  un 
able  to  answer  offhand.  The  verses  celebrate  the  lucky 
man:  — 


28 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


"  The  common  waters  fell 
As  costly  wine  into  his  well. 
The  zephyr  in  his  garden  rolled 
From  plum-trees  vegetable  gold. 
Stream  could  not  so  perversely  wind 
But  corn  of  Guy's  was  there  to  grind." 

The  reference,  of  course,  is  to  a  man  well  known  in  England, 
—Thomas  Guy  (d.  1724),  founder  of  Guy's  Hospital  in  Lon 
don.  He  was  the  George  Peabody  of  his  day.  Beginning  life 
as  a  bookseller,  he  made  a  good  deal  of  money  in  printing 
Bibles,  but  acquired  most  of  his  enormous  fortune  by  finan 
cial  speculations.  He  was  extremely  economical;  for  ex 
ample,  always  ate  his  dinner  on  his  shop  counter,  first  spread 
ing  out  a  newspaper  to  catch  the  crumbs.  His  charities  were 
boundless.  To  his  hospital  he  gave  $1,000,000;  and  at  his 
death  his  will  was  found  to  contain  an  enormous  number  of 
special  benefactions,  including  bequests  to  over  ninety 
cousins.  Emerson  in  his  poem  compares  Guy  to  Polycrates, 
who  was  King  of  Samos  some  five  hundred  years  before 
Christ.  He  says  that  Polycrates  "  chained  the  sunshine  and 
the  breeze";  that  is,  the  very  elements  seemed  to  be  in  his 
pay.  This  run  of  luck  was  without  a  break  up  to  his  death; 
his  fleet  of  a  hundred  ships  was  the  largest  then  known;  he 
conquered  all  his  enemies,  and  amassed  great  treasure.  His 
ally,  Amasis,  King  of  Egypt,  was  so  alarmed  at  his  prosperity, 
fearing  the  envy  of  the  gods,  that  he  advised  him  to  make 
some  noteworthy  sacrifice.  The  story  goes  that  Polycrates 
accordingly  threw  his  emerald  signet-ring  into  the  sea,  but  it 
came  back  to  his  kitchens  in  the  belly  of  a  large  fish, 
as  in  the  Arabian  Nights  story.  The  fears  of  Amasis  were 
finally  justified;  for  the  Persian  satrap  Oroetes  enticed 
Polycrates  to  the  mainland,  and  crucified  him. 

XENOPHANES. 

"  Xenophanes "  embodies  poetically  the  doctrine  of  the 
earnest  old  Greek  agnostic  and  monist  of  that  name,  that 
God,  or  the  All,  is  uncreated,  immovable,  and  one, — not 
immovable  in  its  parts,  but  as  a  whole,  and  just  because  it  is 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR  29 

all.  Xenophanes  saw  the  grandeur  and  incomprehensibility 
of  the  universe,  he  violently  opposed  what  seemed  to  him  the 
disgraceful  polytheism  of  Homer,  and  anticipated  the  modern 
atomic  theory  and  the  doctrine  of  the  unity  of  life  as  revealed 
by  the  spectroscope  and  the  discovery  of  the  conservation 
and  mutual  convertibility  of  forces.  Or,  as  Emerson  puts  it 
in  his  haunting  numbers, — 

"  By  fate,  not  option,  frugal  Nature  gave 
One  scent  to  hyson  and  to  wall-flower, 
One  sound  to  pine-groves  and  to  waterfalls, 
One  aspect  to  the  desert  and  the  lake. 
It  was  her  stern  necessity." 
HAMATREYA. 

The  title  of  the  poem  "  Hamatreya  "  seems  at  first  to  baffle 
a  perfect  and  indubitable  explanation.  The  word  can  be 
found  in  no  English  or  foreign  dictionary  that  the  largest 
libraries  afford.  We  are  indebted,  however,  to  Col.  T.  W. 
Higginson  (the  Critic,  Feb.  18,  1888)  for  not  only  giving  us  a 
clew  to  the  title,  but  for  pointing  out  the  portion  of  the 
Vishnu  Purana  (Wilson's  translation,  1840)  on  which  Emerson 
based  his  "  Earth  Song  "  in  "  Hamatreya,"  and,  in  fact,  got  the 
hint  for  the  whole  poem  ;  namely,  at  the  close  of  Book  IV. 
Maitreya  is  a  disciple  of  Parasara,  who  relates  to  Maitreya 
the  Vishnu  Purana.  Among  other  things  he  tells  Maitreya 
of  a  chant  of  the  Earth,  who  said,  "  When  I  hear  a  king  send 
ing  word  to  another  by  his  ambassador,  'This  earth  is  mine: 
immediately  resign  your  pretensions  to  it,'  I  am  moved  to 
violent  laughter  at  first;  but  it  soon  subsides  in  pity  for  the 
infatuated  fool."  Again,  the  Purana  says,  "Earth  laughs, 
as  if  smiling  with  autumnal  flowers,  to  behold  her  kings  un 
able  to  effect  the  subjugation  of  themselves,"  which  is  Emer 
son's 

"  Earth  laughs  in  flowers,  to  see  her  boastful  boys 

Earth-proud,  proud  of  the  earth  which  is  not  theirs." 
And  again:    "These   were  the  verses,   Maitreya,  which 
Earth  recited,  and  by  listening  to  which  ambition  fades  away, 
like  snow  before  the  sun."    Here  are  Emerson's  lines: — 


30  THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 

"  When  I  heard  the  Earth-song, 
I  was  no  longer  brave; 
My  avarice  cooled 
Like  lust  in  the  chill  of  the  grave." 

Colonel  Higginson  suggests  that  Emerson  may  also  have 
had  in  mind,  in  writing  "  Hamatreya,"  Psalm  xlix.  n.  As  he 
rightly  says,  the  title  evidently  is  meant  to  give  a  hint  of  the 
Hindoo  source  of  the  argument  of  the  poem.  It  is  in  line 
with  the  uniform  custom  of  Emerson  in  giving  historical 
catch-words,  especially  proper  names,  as  his  titles.  After  an 
exhaustive  search  through  all  the  Hindoo  scriptures,  I  have 
reached  a  conviction  which  approaches  absolute  certainty 
that  Hamatreya  is  Emerson's  imperfect  recollection  of  Mai- 
treya  or  that  he  purposely  coined  the  word.  Emerson,  it  is 
nearly  certain,  read  the  Vishnu  Purana,  translated  by  H.  H. 
Wilson  (a  large  and  costly  work),  by  the  copy  then  in  the 
Harvard  Library  or  the  Boston  Athenaeum,  perhaps  taking 
brief  notes,  but  omitting  to  write  down  "  Maitreya."  In  his 
exhaustive  index  of  proper  names,  appended  to  the  Vishnu 
Purana,  Wilson  has  no  such  word  as  Hamatreya,  nor  does  it 
occur  anywhere  in  the  book.  To  clench  the  argument,  Prof. 
Charles  R.  Lanman,  the  well-known  Sanskrit  scholar  of  Har 
vard  University,  writes  me  that  "  Hamatreya  is  not  a  San 
skrit  word."  "  The  Atreyas,"  he  says, "  were  the  descendants 
of  Atri."  "  It  is  an  easy  mistake  to  make  Hamatreya  out  of 
Maitreya.  I  really  think  you  will  have  to  assume  a  simple 
slip  here."* 

CASELLA. 

Emerson  is  not  wilfully  obscure.     But  he  comes  danger 
ously  near  to  being  so  in  the  demand  he  often  makes  upon  his 
readers  for  out-of-the-way  knowledge.    "  Casella  "  is  the  title 
of  an  Emersonian  quatrain, — 

"  Test  of  the  poet  is  knowledge  of  love, 
For  Eros  is  older  than  Saturn  or  Jove. 
Never  was  poet,  of  late  or  of  yore, 
Who  was  not  tremulous  with  love-lore." 

*Prof.  Charles  Eliot  Norton  sends  me  an  expression  of  his  gratitude  for  my  solution  of 
the  Hamatreya  mystery,  which  he  says  always  puzzled  him. 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR  31 

The  reference  is  to  Dante's  friend  Casella  ("Casella  mio"), 
whom  he  meets  in  Purgatory,  and  who  sweetly  sings  (as  of 
yore  on  earth  he  was  wont)  a  canzone  by  Dante  himself, — 
"Amor,  che  nella  mente  mi  ragiona."  Emerson's  favorite  poet, 
Milton,  in  his  sonnet  to  Henry  Lawes,  alludes,  as  Mr.  Norton 
points  out,  to  this  friendship: — 

"  Dante  shall  give  fame  leave  to  set  thee  higher 
Than  his  Casella,  whom  he  wooed  to  sing 
Met  in  the  milder  shades  of  Purgatory." 

ADAKRUN  NEMONTAI  AIONA. 

The  title  dddupvv  vepovTai  aicova  is  from  Pindar,  I  be 
lieve.  Emerson  took  it  from  the  Dial,  where  (July,  '43)  it 
appears  as  the  motto  to  a  poem  by  Charles  A.  Dana  on  "  Man 
hood."  It  means,  literally,  " They  pass  a  tearless  life";  or, 
very  freely  rendered,  "  They  live  a  life  of  smiles," — a  senti 
ment  explained  by  the  first  lines, — 

"  A  new  commandment,  said  the  smiling  Muse, 
I  give  my  darling  son,  Thou  shalt  not  preach." 

RHEA. 

Even  in  so  slight  a  matter  as  choosing  a  name  for  his 
verses  "  To  Rhea,"  Emerson's  philosophical  belief  is  glimpsed; 
for  Rhea  was  the  mother  of  gods,  and  such  he  believed  all 
women  to  be.  The  thought  of  this  remarkable  poem,  which 
its  author  feigns  to  have  received  from  the  thousand  chatter 
ing  tongues  of  the  poplar-tree,  is  extremely  subtle  and  some 
what  difficult  to  formulate.  The  analysis  is  this.  If  you,  a 
wife,  have  lost  your  supremacy  in  your  husband's  affections, 
take  a  strange  and  noble  revenge,  not  by  hating,  but,  in  a 
kind  of  calm  altruistic  despair,  endowing  him  with  all  the 
gifts  and  blessings  at  your  command.  The  poem  is  headed 
"  To  Rhea  "  (Rhea  being  the  wife  of  the  cruel  Saturn,  who 
devoured  his  own  children)  as  to  a  wife  whose  husband  had 
merely  "  drank  of  Cupid's  nectar  cup,"  married  her  from  sex- 
instinct  alone,  and  then,  the  "  bandages  of  purple  light " 
fallen  from  "his  eyes,"  treated  her  with  indifference.  But 
she  continues  to  love  him;  and,  more,  the  poet  gives  her  the 


32  THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 

advice  just  noted,  illustrating  by  the  supposed  case  of  a  god 
loving  a  mortal  maid,  and  warily  knowing  that  she,  with  her 
inferior  ideals,  can  never  adequately  requite  his  love,  yet 
nobly  endowing  her  with  all  gifts  and  graces,  which  are  the 
hostages  he  pawns  for  freedom  from  "  his  thrall."  He  does 
this  in  an  altruistic  spirit,  in  order  by  her  to  "  model  newer 
races"  and  "carry  man  to  new  degrees  of  power  and  come 
liness."  But  what  thrall  ?  We  must  walk  warily  here.  In 
order  not  to  seem  to  give  his  verses  an  autobiographical  cast 
(although  the  god,  the  "wise  Immortal,"  of  them  is  really 
such  a  type  as  the  seer  Emerson  himself),  he  withdraws  into 
dim  recesses  and  speaks  in  subtlest  metaphors.  The  thrall,  I 
think,  is  the  bondage  a  lover  or  husband  is  in  to  his  beloved, 
in  whom  the  solecisms  and  disenchantments  of  possession 
have  supplanted  the  poetic  illusions  of  romantic  love.  The 
man  of  supreme  wisdom,  by  the  magic  of  self-sacrifice  and 
boundless  profusion  of  gifts,  turns  the  trap  or  prison  in  which 
nature  has  caught  him  into  a  bower  of  Eden.  By  the  road  of 
generosity  he  escapes.  He  cunningly  builds  up  in  her  mind 
gratitude  and  friendship  in  place  of  the  lost  romanticism. 
There  is  in  this  treatment  of  love  a  touch  of  the  cold-blooded 
philosophy  of  the  Emersonian  critique  of  friendship.  But  if 
it  is  not  a  marriage  of  ideal  kind  which  he  celebrates,  such  as 
that  of  the  Brownings,  he  at  least  embodies  in  his  verse 
the  shrewd  love-philosophy  of  the  practical-poetical  English 
man,  united  to  the  average  woman  for  the  furtherance  of  the 
ends  of  the  species. 

Mr.  George  Browne,  in  his  Emerson  primer,  thinks  that  the 
key-thought  of  "  Rhea  "  is  in  these  lines  from  "  The  World- 
Soul"  about  the  gods: — 

"  To  him  who  scorns  their  charities 
Their  arms  fly  open  wide." 

But  the  parallelism  somewhat  halts.  For  mark:  In  the  one 
case  Napoleon's  maxim  is  embodied,  that  God  is  on  the  side 
of  the  strongest  battalions.  The  one  who  scorns  the  favorit- 
isms  and  alms  of  Heaven,  and  yet,  will  he  nill  he,  receives  its 
aid,  is  really  the  strong  God  himself  in  mask,  the  noble  and 


THE  AMERICAN  A  UTHOR  33 

resolute  man  executing  his  will  in  time  and  space.  But  in 
the  case  supposed  in  "  Rhea,"  of  husband  and  wife,  the  ones 
who  scorn  love  are  those  not  deserving  of  gifts  at  all  (although 
Nature  finds  her  account  in  them),  but  persons  who  receive 
gifts  in  charity  from  one  altruistically  nobler  than  them 
selves.  It  is  just  this  idea  of  sublime  self-sacrifice  that  gives 
to  "Rhea"  its  strange  subtlety  and  its  uniqueness  among 
poems  on  love.  There  is  a  consolatory  under-thought  in  the 
palimpsest,  too.  By  his  illustration  of  the  god  and  the  mortal 
maid  the  poet  wishes  Rhea  to  divine  that,  if  wives  make  moan 
over  husbands'  lost  love,  husbands  no  less  often  have  reason 
to  lament  the  cooled  affection  of  wives. 

URIEL. 

.The  central  idea  in  "  Uriel "  is  that  there  is  no  such  thing 
as  evil.  This  thesis  is  put  into  the  mouth  of  Uriel,  one  of  the 
seven  archangels,  because  he  was  the  "  interpreter  "  of  God's 
will.  So  Milton  says,  in  the  locus  classicus  on  Uriel  in  Book 
III  of  "  Paradise  Lost."  He  also  says  he  was 

"  The  sharpest-sighted  spirit  of  all  in  heav'n." 

His  station  was  in  the  all-viewing  sun.  Uriel,  in  Milton,  tells 
how,  when  the  universe  was  yet  chaos, 

"  Or  ever  the  wild  Time  coined  itself 
Into  calendar  months  and  days," 

he  saw  the  worlds  a-forming, — earth,  sun,  and  stars.  Emer 
son  (or  "  Sayd  ")  takes  Milton  at  his  word,  and  leads  us  back 
into  that  dark  backward  and  abysm  of  time,  and  lets  us  over 
hear  a  conversation  between  Uriel  and  the  other  seraphs. 
At  his  speech  "  the  gods  shook,"  because  if  there  is  no  sin, 
if  all  comes  round  to  good,  even  a  lie,  then  good-bye  gods, 
hells  and  heavens,  and  their  punishments.  But  note  that, 
though  the  All  turns  your  wrong  to  good  in  the  end,  yet  you, 
an  individual,  suffer  for  your  wrong-doing. 

In  a  paper  in  the  Andover  Review  for  March,  1887,  the  late 
Dr.  C.  C.  Everett  says  that  Dr.  Hedge  suggested  to  him  that 
"  Uriel "  probably  took  its  origin  in  the  discussions  of  the 
Boston  Association  of  Ministers  on  the  theme  (then  rife), 


34  THE  AMERICAN  A  UTHOR 

"There  is  no  line  in  nature":  all  is  circular,  and  by  the  law 
of  reaction  every  deed  returns  upon  the  doer.  At  any  rate, 
it  was  written  in  1838,  soon  after  his  Divinity  School  Address. 
(Emerson  in  Concord,  by  Edward  Emerson.) 

TERMINUS. 

The  god  of  boundaries  in  ancient  Rome — Terminus — gives 
his  name  to  the  cheeriest  of  monodies  or  anchoring  songs  sung 
by  the  gayest  of  old  sailors  on  the  sea  of  eternity,  and  at  last 
approaching  port.  Terminus,  like  Hermes  the  Greek  god  of 
bounds,  was  shown  in  his  statues  without  hands  or  feet,  to 
indicate  that  he  never  moved.  Was  Emerson  a  little  rusty 
in  his  classical  lore,  or  did  he  boldly  and  knowingly  defy 
classical  verities  when  he  says  the  divinity  came  to  him  "in 
his  fatal  rounds"  ?  He  seems  to  have  attributed  to  Terminus 
patrolling  functions  like  those  of  his  own  New  England 
village  fence- viewers.  Or,  rather,  speaking  in  noble  and 
more  adequate  terms,  has  he  not  added  to  the  world's 
mythologies  a  new  and  poetical  deity, — the  god  of  the 
bounds  of  human  life,  a  kind  of  avant-courier  or  Death's 
dragoman  to  announce  to  men  their  approaching  end  ? 
"  Terminus"  was  written  about  1866,  when  Emerson  was  in 
or  near  his  sixty-third  year,  and  sixteen  years  before  his 
death. 


APPENDIX. 

I  have  in  my  portfolio  a  few  miscellaneous  notes  on  Emerson's  poems, 
which  readers  of  his  may  find  interesting. 

"The  Nun's  Aspiration  "  is  in  form  a  dramatic  monologue  ;  yet  the 
mask  is  ill  adjusted,  and  the  nun  has  plainly  a  masculine,  Emersonian 
trick  of  speech.  No  nun's  religion  ever  rose  into  such  cold  regions  of 
abstract  philosophy,  nor  (needless  to  say)  did  a  nun  ever  have  a  dream  of 
taking  the  arm  of  a  comet  and  gliding  off  through  space,  as  Emerson's 
transcendental  nun  does,  into  the  supersolar  regions.  Tennyson,  in  his 
similar  poem,  "  St.  Agnes,"  gives  us  the  real  thing  in  lines  of  marvelous 
beauty  :  his  nun  breathes  pure  religion;  Emerson's  abstraction  utters 
pure  transcendental  philosophy. 

I  find  that  the  following  poems  were  first  printed  in  the  Dial :  "  The 
Sphinx"  (1840),  "  To  Rhea,"  "  Saadi  "  (1842),  "  The  Snow-storm  "  (Jan., 
1841),  "  Ode  to  Beauty"  (Oct.,  1843),  "  Woodnotes"  (1840). 


THE  AMERICAN  A  UTHOR  35 

The  famous  "  Humblebee  "  lyric,  as  first  printed  in  James  Freeman 
Clarke's  Western  Literary  Messenger,  began  with  the  weak  line,  "  Fine 
bumblebee  !  fine  bumblebee  !"  for  which,  later,  "  Burly,  dozing  humble- 
bee  !"  was  substituted.  The  following  also  originally  came  after  the  first 
verse-group : 

"  Flower-bells, 
Honied  cells, 
These  the  tents 
Which  he  frequents." 

These  were  dropped;  and  elsewhere  were  added  the  four  lines  on  flowers, 
beginning  "  Grass  with  green  flag  half-mast  high."  It  is  just  as  well  to 
admit  that  Emerson,  like  Shakespeare  and  all  other  poets,  nodded  occa 
sionally.  Shakespeare  mispronounces  Stephano,  Romeo,  Andronicus, 
Desdemona,  etc.  He  and  his  contemporaries  pronounce  "Epicurean" 
wrongly,  as  does  Emerson,  whose  pronunciation  "  Epicu'rean  "  in  this 
poem  may  be  matched  by  cotyl'edon  in  his  "  Merlin,"  Part  II,  11.  n  and 
12  : 

"  Leaf  answers  leaf  upon  the  bough, 
And  match  the  paired  cotyledons," 

The  Greek  is  KorvXrjSoov  (Kot-u-lay'-don)  and  there  never  has  been, 
nor  could  be,  in  the  nature  of  things,  any  lexicographical  authority  for 
cotyl'edon. 

"  The  Rhodora,"  as  published  in  1839  in  the  Western  Literary  Mes 
senger,  is  minus  the  following  two  choice  lines  that  add  the  couleur  de 
rose  tint  to  the  "  purple  petals"  and  "  black  water  "  of  the  poet's  palette: 

"  Here  might  the  red-bird  come  his  plumes  to  cool, 
And  court  the  flower  that  cheapens  his  array." 

In  place  of  this  felicitous  word-picture  (which  Shakespeare  never  sur 
passed),  Emerson  first  printed  the  following  much  weaker  lines: 

"  Young  Raphael  might  covet  such  a  school ; 
The  lively  show  beguiled  me  from  my  way." 

The  newspaper  version  also  has  "waters"  for  "water,"  "marsh"  for 
"  earth,"  and  "  Dear,  tell  them,"  for  "  Tell  them,  dear,"  in  11.  6,  10,  and 
ii  respectively. 

In  midsummer  of  1858  a  party  of  ten  members  of  the  Adirondack  Club 
of  Boston  put  on  red  or  blue  flannel  shirts,  packed  up  some  natural-history 
tools  and  material,  and  with  guns  and  rods  in  hand  traveled  up  into  the 
Adirondack  mountains  and  camped,  each  man  with  a  guide,  in  the  virgin 
forest  of  evergreens  and  hard  wood  : 

"  Ten  scholars,  wonted  to  lie  warm  and  soft 
In  well-hung  chambers  daintily  bestowed." 


36 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR 


To  celebrate  this  "philosophers'  camp,"  as  it  has  been  called,  Emerson 
wrote  his  journal  poem,  "  The  Adirondacks."  The  club  was  an  offshoot 
of  the  Boston  Saturday  Club,  of  which  Emerson  was  one  of  the  founders 
and  chief  lights.  The  ten  campers  were :  Dr.  Jeffries  Wyman  (Presi 
dent  of  the  Boston  Natural  History  Society  and  professor  at  the  Agassiz 
Museum)  and  Dr.  Estes  Howe,  of  Cambridge,  as  tall  of  his  hands  as 
any  man  in  Illyria  (these  were  the  "  two  doctors  ");  the  benevolent  Judge 
E.  Rockwood  Hoar,  of  Concord  ;  James  Russell  Lowell,  the  youngest 
and  the  leader  of  the  party,  with  his  wallet  full  of  bans  mots  ;  Louis 
Agassiz,  of  the  genial  face  and  twinkling  eye  and  French  bewraying 
tongue  ;  the  witty  and  lovable  John  Holmes,  who  had  a  younger  brother, 
Oliver  Wendell,  not  a  bit  better  than  he ;  the  artist,  W.  J.  Stillman  ; 
A.  Binney  ;  and  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson, — wit-crackers,  scientists,  poets, 
good  fellows  all,  and  justifying  their  poet's  eulogium  : 
"  Wise  and  polite — and  if  I  drew 

Their  several  portraits  you  would  know 

Chaucer  had  no  such  worthy  crew, 

Nor  Boccace  in  Decameron." 

Some  lists  include  Samuel  G.  Howe,  the  philhellene,  and  Horatio  Wood 
man,  of  unfortunate  memory.  But  Mr.  F.  B.  Sanborn,  Howe's  biog 
rapher,  writes  me  that  Howe  at  least  was  not  with  them,  his  health  not 
permitting  such  an  experience.  Mr.  Emerson  modestly  calls  his  poem  a 
"journal";  but  it  is  in  form  and  contents  a  pastoral  idyl,  like  Tenny 
son's  English  pastorals.  The  campers  made  their  hut  with  their  own 
hands  and  roofed  it  with  spruce  bark,  and  they  slept  in  their  blankets 
on  beds  of  evergreen  twigs.  Jules  Marcou,  in  his  excellent  Life  of 
Agassiz,  relates  that  the  gentle  Longfellow  was  invited  to  go,  but  re 
fused  very  emphatically,  because  Emerson  had  taken  a  rifle,  and  he 
averred  that  somebody  would  get  shot !  After  much  solicitation,  one 
morning  Agassiz  (says  his  old  friend  Marcou)  was  persuaded  to  fire  one 
shot  at  a  mark;  he  hit  the  white  and  was  loudly  complimented,  but  could 
not  be  induced  to  fire  again.  In  fact  this  was  the  first  and  only  shot  of 
his  life,  says  Marcou.  For  this  trip  Emerson  bought  a  rifle,  learned  how 
to  shoot,  and  taught  his  son,  too,  but  is  not  known  to  have  hit,  or  even 
shot  at,  any  living  thing.  The  chief  incident  of  the  jaunt  was  the  news 
that  came  to  them  in  the  wilds  of  the  successful  laying  of  the  first 
Atlantic  cable, — news  received  with  vigorous  cheers  by  these  brainy  New 
Englanders. 

Emerson's  "  Voluntaries"  is  an  elegy  partly  written  to  stimulate  en 
listment  during  the  war  and  partly  in  memory  of  Colonel  Robert  G.  Shaw, 
the  brave  young  martyr  who  fell  on  the  red  ramparts  of  Fort  Wagner. 
Apart  from  duty,  it  was  worth  so  dying  to  be  immortalized  by  such  a  poet 
as  Emerson  and  such  a  sculptor  as  St.  Gaudens.  The  title  "  Voluntaries," 
says  Mrs.  Annie  Fields,  was  suggested  to  Emerson  by  James  T.  Fields, 


THE  AMERICAN  AUTHOR  37 

to  whom,  in  1863,  he  read  the  poem,  in  a  chamber  of  the  Parker  House  in 
Boston. 

Apropos  of  the  tender  and  pathetic  "  Threnody,"  Louisa  Alcott  tells 
of  going  as  a  girl  of  eight  to  Emerson's  home  to  inquire  about  the 
health  of  little  Waldo,  and  how  the  father  answered  her  knock,  his  face 
so  worn  by  watching  and  changed  by  grief  as  to  startle  her,  and  said, 
"  Child,  he  is  dead  !"  and  closed  the  door.  Those  few  words,  she  said, 
had  in  them  more  pathos  for  her  than  the  grief  of  the  "  Threnody." 

The  ringing  Tyrtean  lines  of  the  "  Boston  Hymn,"  "  God  said,  I  am 
tired  of  kings,"  "My  thunderbolt  has  eyes  to  see  his  way  home  to  the 
mark,"  etc.,  were  read  at  a  mass  meeting  in  Music  Hall  on  New  Year's 
Day,  1863,  after  the  reading  to  an  enthusiastic  cheering  audience  of  Lin 
coln's  Emancipation  Proclamation.  Emerson,  as  often  happened,  got  his 
manuscript  fumbled  and  the  leaves  fell  amid  the  crowd,  disconcerting 
him  a  good  deal;  yet  one  who  was  present  speaks  of  "  the  thrill  of  empha 
sis  he  gave  to  those  stern  and  vivid  words  as  they  rang  out  to  the  eager 
crowd: " 

"  Pay  ransom  to  the  owner 
And  fill  the  bag  to  the  brim. 
Who  is  the  owner?    The  slave  is  owner, 
And  ever  was.    Pay  him." 

At  first  he  had  been  in  favor  of  paying  the  masters,  as  Great  Britain 
did,  but  was  brought  over  to  the  free  emancipation  idea  as  on  the  whole 
a  just  and  inevitable  war  measure. 

In  "  My  Garden,"  the  stanza, 

"  Waters  that  wash  my  garden  side 
Play  not  in  Nature's  lawful  web; 
They  heed  not  moon  or  solar  tide — 
Five  years  elapse  from  flood  to  ebb," 

refers  to  the  curious  facts  connected  with  the  ebb  and  flow  of  the  waters 
of  Walden  Pond,  on  the  high  land  of  which,  on  the  shore  opposite  to 
Thoreau's  hut,  Emerson  owned  land  which  he  called  his  "garden." 
Thoreau  gives,  in  his  Walden,  the  facts  about  the  ebb  and  flow,  how 
the  water  is  often  at  the  highest  in  a  dry  summer  and  at  its  lowest  when 
neighboring  ponds  and  streams  are  full. 

The  poem  "  Forbearance  "  ("  Hast  thou  named  all  the  birds  without  a 
gun  ")  is  a  tribute  to  Emerson's  friend,  the  late  J.  Elliot  Cabot,  a  man  of 
gentle  and  retiring  life,  of  sweet  nature  and  scholarly  tastes.  He  was, 
as  is  known,  Emerson's  literary  executor. 

Emerson's  "Good-bye,  Proud  World,"  was  written,  not  in  Newton, 
Mass. ,  as  has  been  stated,  but  under  the  pines  in  Canterbury  Lane, — now 
Walnut  Ave.,  near  Blue  Hill  Ave., — Roxbury,  Mass.,  in  1823,  when  Emer 
son  was  a  young  man  acting  as  usher  (/.  e.,  assistant)  in  his  elder  brother 


38  THE  AMERICAN  A  UTHOR 

William's  school  for  girls  (see  Dr.  Holmes's  Emerson,  p.  130).  The 
school  was  kept  in  their  mother's  house.  Canterbury  village  was  at  that 
time  "a  picturesque  wilderness  of  savin,  barberry  bushes,  cat-brier  and 
sumach."  Ralph  Waldo  was  then  eighteen  years  old,  and  the  lines  don't 
express  (say  his  friends)  any  cynical  dissatisfaction  with  life,  but  merely 
the  pleasure  felt  by  a  poetical  lover  of  Nature  in  her  peaceful  solitudes. 
But  Emerson's  readers,  by  a  kind  of  blind  instinct,— not  so  far  wrong  after 
all,  it  seems  to  me, — have  persisted  in  assigning  this  poem  to  the  period 
of  his  retirement  from  the  ministry  and  making  it  the  expression  of  his 
feeling  at  that  time. 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 

AA    001  148266  8 


DATE  DUE 


JU112 


ll  12 


1 


JUL26 


JUL2 


JAN  4 


'  ' 


1972 


19716 


972 


13777 


iiy/bi 


PRINTED  IN  U.S.A. 


J  ^210  00276  2415 


